Great Expectations – Up to which it sadly did not live

Ahoy,

I’m sallying-forth with a good, old-fashioned review of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens which I rattled through in the first week or two of the Christmas holiday. I’ve tried not to sound too GCSE (I am nineteen for heaven’s sake) or too pompous about the whole thing but to write in a way that is both personal and personable. If it’s insightful into the bargain as well, then we may be said to be cooking most assuredly on gas.

I thoroughly like this novel. I’ll go into why in a minute, but the question with which I find myself wrestling is whether I think that it is ‘good’. Whilst it is undoubtedly a fine story that ticks all the right boxes of a bildungsroman and a few more of its own devising and whilst it certainly gave me pleasure to read it, I have to wonder whether the mode of story-telling is simplistic. What is Dickens actually doing, is my question, above and beyond telling me what is factually happening? There is not necessarily a reason why he should be doing anything more and if somebody else were to base a blog-essay (hereafter a blessay) of this kind on the premise that a writer has to be doing something clever with their narrative and has to be moving literature on in some way, I would be the first to shout them down. It is not essential, in my view, that a writer must be writing in stylistically revolutionary ways even at the distance of centuries; I am merely interested in whether I think Dickens does so.

In an essay published in Tribune in 1945, George Orwell expanded on a term coined by G.K. Chesterton of the ‘Good Bad Book’. Orwell’s definition was a book that ‘has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished’. Clearly, Dickens has survived, and indeed been canonised, in a way that many three-volume Victorian novelists have survived and one has only to glance at a Radio or Television schedule to see that he is prime territory for adaptation as well as being read or having been read or studied at some point by most people of a literary bent. Orwell includes the Sherlock Holmes stories in his examples of good bad books and whilst I happen both to like and love the Sherlock Holmes stories, whilst I can manage only to like Great Expectations, I am perfectly willing to accept that Conan Doyle is not an especially good writer. I can’t help but feel that Dickens, for me, though certainly not for Orwell, is in danger of drifting into this category.

Orwell takes trouble to point out that ‘readable’ is not a glib, off-hand term; ‘the existence of good bad literature – the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously – is a reminder that art is not the same thing a cerebration’ and I would apply this to Great Expectations. There are moments of immense drama in the plot: Orlick’s near-murder of Pip I find to be a genuinely desperate moment; my heart sank when we discover that Biddy has married Joe; the relationship between Matthew Pocket and Pip is rather sweet and touching and Pip’s outpouring to Estella in front of Miss Havisham is brimming with pathos. They are certainly exciting and some I found moving, but I suppose the question that I can no longer avoid is whether these moments are all just a little bit too far apart.

I have no automatic problem with long art. Size matters to me when it comes to art and so I am very happy to sit through Wagner because I find his music-dramas to be works of such compelling emotional and intellectual ferocity that a numb arse when I leave the auditorium is a small price to pay. As is well known, Dickens published in serial format and Great Expectations was no exception. I have heard the opinion expressed that had he only gone back and ‘boiled down’ (not my phrase) his novels into a more stream-lined form then they would be much more readable in a single-edition. As the actress said to the bishop; I can’t swallow that. Part of the beauty of a novel is that you read a bit, you go away, and then you come back to it. Your expectations have time to develop betwixt instalments. The novel becomes a part of your life for a bit of time, and I can’t seriously allow myself to argue that some of Great Expectations ought to be stripped away just so a reader can get through it a bit quicker. Would that I could, but I can’t be that ruthless.

So, I seem to have argued myself back to my opening get-out-of-jail/gaol-free-card which was that art doesn’t have to be stylistically revolutionary or even stylistically evolutionary to be good. Great Expectations was good fun. It wasn’t brilliant. I see the world only slightly differently because of it. But Dickens is lovely, and for that I think he may be forgiven.

Feeble and rather bland as this conclusion is, I would be grateful of any comments below. I seem to have talked around the book a great deal without talking about it very much. Agreements are very welcome and disagreements are welcome at least as much, if not more so, and how else are we to get to know each other better if not by communicating? To quote Churchill; ‘I am always willing to learn, though not always willing to be taught.’ Any comments about the blog as a whole are also welcome; it will not have escaped your notice that it is in its genesis.

Next time on CastingBroadly; The Innate Theatricality of Sherlock Holmes.

Jx